The Apology of Librarian Emeritus Varn

The Apology of Librarian Emeritus Varn is a formal instrument of redress, drafted in the winter of Floor 8 and entered into the general register in Aperture 412, by which Librarian Emeritus Oset Varn sought to discharge an admitted wrong against the shelving of the floor he had spent nine years auditing. It is not, strictly, a confession, and Varn resisted the word in every recension of the text; it is an apology in the technical sense preserved in Concordance 11, being a statement of the wrong, an acknowledgement of its consequence, and a specification of remedy, in that order. The document runs to eleven leaves, of which eight are remedy.

It is cited most often today not for its content but for its form. The Apology established, and is still the leading example of, the principle that an apology must be readable — a ruling of Librarian Petit issued two years after Varn's death and applied retrospectively to the Apology itself, which had until then circulated only in a hand so cramped that three separate offices had declined to receive it.

Origin: the mis-shelving on Floor 8

The wrong Varn acknowledged was the transfer, in the winter of Floor 8, of some four hundred volumes from the eastern stacks to a classification he later determined to be "confident and wrong in equal measure" (Varn, Apology, Leaf 2). The volumes were not lost. They were, in Varn's phrase, "available, and in the wrong place, which is a slower kind of loss." The distinction mattered to him and matters still to the offices that quote him; the Varn Dispute that followed established the practical limits of Clause 3, and it is generally agreed that the Dispute would have settled faster had the Apology been legible from the outset.

The consequences were not confined to the stacks. Varn's remorse, by his own account and by the corroborating testimony of two junior clerks, was of a sufficient density that the corridor adjacent to the eastern stacks reorganized itself around it; that sub-corridor is now catalogued as Apologetic Geometries and remains the only floor-section in the Tower whose dimensions are recorded as provisional. Whether the Apology caused the corridor or merely described it is a question the register leaves open. The corridor does not.

The readability ruling

Librarian Petit first used the informal name "The Endless Apology" for the document in a marginal note of Aperture 419, and in the same note observed that a remedy no one can read is not a remedy but a relic. His formal ruling followed in Aperture 421 and is quoted in nearly every subsequent dispute over documentary form:

"An apology that cannot be read by the wronged party is a performance. Let it be written plainly, and let the plain version be the version of record."

— Librarian Petit, Ruling on Documentary Form, Aperture 421

The ruling was applied to the Apology retrospectively, which required a fair copy to be made from the original leaves by a scribe of the Librarian Corps who was not permitted to consult Varn, Varn having died in the interim. The fair copy was completed in Aperture 423 and is the version now cited. The original remains in the eastern stacks, in the wrong place, which the Corps has ruled is appropriate.

Dispute over authorship

Two positions are maintained. The first, held by the Librarian Order and set out in its register of instruments, is that the Apology is Varn's alone: drafted by him, sealed by him, and entered under his name without amendment. The second, advanced in a dissent circulated from Aelred's annotations to Dissenting Notes on the Permanence of Administrative Acts, holds that the eight leaves of remedy were drafted by a clerk of the sealing office and that Varn supplied only the three leaves of acknowledgement — making the Apology, in Aelred's phrase, "a wrong with a borrowed cure."

The evidence is inconclusive. The hand of the remedy leaves differs from the hand of the acknowledgement, but Varn's hand was known to differ from itself across a long winter. Concordance 11 is silent on collaborative apology; Concordance 17, which is not silent, is widely held to be about something else. The dispute has run since Aperture 440 and shows no sign of resolution.

Text, seal, and standing

The Apology was sealed with the ordinary seal of the auditing office and dated, in the manner then current, to the day of the wrong rather than the day of the drafting. This retroactive dating was challenged and upheld; the challenge is recorded in the Varn Dispute as a preliminary matter and is often taught alongside the more celebrated attempt of Ottilie Varn to date a seal to a future day in the year 14 C III, an error of opposite sign and considerably more consequence.

The document carries no counter-seal, a defect noted in every recension and corrected in none. It remains in force. It has never been superseded, though it has twice been annexed, and the annexes contradict each other on the question of whether the remedy was ever carried out. The eastern stacks, for the record, hold that it was.